Amazon offers workers $2,000 to quit, but the incentive is nothing like Zappos’

At an Amazon warehouse, a year's work is a feat deserving of reward.

Amazon has instituted a new program where it offers its own employees thousands of dollars to leave the company. But it doesn't want them to take the money. According to CEO Jeff Bezos, the offer is a tactic to ensure the company's employees want to work there, but his program differs significantly from the Zappos one it's compared to.

In a letter to shareholders issued Thursday, Bezos said that the program is inspired by the Amazon-owned Zappos, which has long offered its employees money to quit in order to weed out the ones who don't value the Zappos mission above a few thousand dollars.

Back in 2008, Zappos said 97 percent of its employees did not take the offer to quit. However, Zappos' program differs slightly in that it only offers the money to customer service employees, enticing them to quit with $3,000 after a four-week training program and one week of work.

Zappos says it offers money to its employees on the basis that training them is expensive. The goal of incentivizing quitting, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, is "identifying the misfits early." Zappos' entire reputation is built on customer service, so finding dedicated workers is important to the company.

The online shoe company continues the practice to this day, and the amount is still $3,000 after only a little more than a month of work.

By contrast, Amazon is offering quitting wages to employees at its fulfillment centers. Fulfillment center workers are not customer-facing; instead, they walk the many-football-fields'-worth of Amazon's warehouses, pulling items from shelves and boxes to pack up and ship. Multiple investigative pieces have been written about the physically strenuous jobs. Employees can be required to walk 12 to 15 miles per day and are pushed to "pick" a certain number of items each hour (say 120 items an hour, or two per minute). That number periodically increases.

Other reports have found that Amazon's warehouse working conditions are not very comfortable. One report showed there was no air conditioning or even circulation in one warehouses—managers wouldn't open the doors for fear of theft. Instead, the company opted to keep ambulances on standby for employees who pass out from heat exhaustion.

Amazon doesn't make the initial offer of $2,000 to quit until the employee has been in the job for a year, and it increases the offer by $1,000 each year up to $5,000. In light of how difficult fulfillment center jobs are, the offer seems less like ensuring alignment with the company's mission and more like incentive to lower rates of turnover.

In her feature on working as a picker in an Amazon warehouse, Mother Jones' Mac McClelland noted that the company was extremely strict about lunch breaks (the 30 minutes were really "29 minutes and 59 seconds") lest the employees be docked "penalty points." A single minute of lateness during the first week means they are fired, and four total days of absence thereafter equals a firing, too.

"The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want," Bezos writes to shareholders. The letter to the employee who has made it to a year in service is entitled "Please Don't Take This Offer."

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston